Here and there

by
John Thomson | Story:
61387 -
Apr 14, 2011 / 5:00 am

Photo: Contributed

It’s a go.

The sixth tower at Landmark Centre will, over the next two years, head to the sky with seventeen floors and 230,000 sq.ft. of commercial space. Building six will be located directly across from building four.

The new building will be equipped with the second power plant as we find in the other buildings which allows technology companies to have continuous power no matter what happens to BC Hydro. There will be a full basement and next door a 436 stall-parking garage.

It is a Stober Construction project.

When asked about the tenant picture as far as the new building is concerned I was told that Landmark Centre was very steady during the recession with very few changes taking place. Many of the present tenants are looking for more space. A number of major businesses are in negotiation for the space in the new building.

The contract for cement work will begin as soon as the basement is ready and should take about two months. Fintry Contracting is doing the work.

This entire development started in the ground in 1989 and has become the business community of the city. With the sixth building there will be a total of 750,000 sq.ft. of commercial space.

There is space for a full coffee shop and Tapas bar in the project and they are not sure yet about a gym or any other retail that may be included in the tower.

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According to a recent article, your clothing bill is about to go up by 10 percent, with some of the increase happening this spring and the rest by the end of the year.

On an inflation-adjusted basis, overall clothing prices have declined over the last 10 years as lower-cost raw materials and goods from low-labor-cost countries like China flooded the market. But in more recent months, both material and labor costs have been escalating.

Advertisement and materials make up to 20 to 50 percent of the cost of clothes, with labor accounting for much of the remainder. And with the worldwide recession improving and inflation climbing in countries like China and Vietnam, wage rates are also heading north.

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The Osoyoos Celebrity Wine Festival launched its 2011 festival. The festival of food and wine pairing events hosted annually by actor/director Jason Priestley and friends, has added new events and this year features Juno award-winning, country music star and actor from CBC TV's Heartland, George Canyon. Canyon will play an acoustic set at the Celebrity Wine Auction and Beach Party at the Walnut Beach Resort on June 10.

Priestley is one of the owners of Black Hills Winery, which is a co-founder of the Festival. Each year, Jason extends an invitation to his Hollywood friends to join him in Osoyoos for the weekend, creating a unique opportunity for festival-goers to rub shoulders with celebrities from the Film and Television industry while enjoying the South Okanagan's finest wines and food pairings created by the region's top chefs and winemakers.

The 2011 Festival runs June 9 to 12 and starts with a new event, the Sunset Sabre Soiree at Spirit Ridge Resort. Celebrities and winemakers will sabre off wine bottles while guests taste the finest sparkling wines from the region. Saturday night features The Vinos a red carpeted awards ceremony and contest for the best wine commercial on B.C. Wines, held at the Watermark Beach Resort. Amateur and professional filmmakers submit entries and compete for cash and wine.

Tickets to events can be purchased on the Festival's new website. The website was developed by Okanagan's Pulse Group and features full details on events and links to last year's hilarious entries for the wine commercial film festival.

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I always have such pleasant memories of The Greenery when it was out on Rutland Road and we were just starting our yard from scratch. With the opening this year, the Segler family are celebrating their thirtieth year in business. In 1994 the business was moved out to a new location on Dilworth Drive.

It is a much larger space with 2.5 acres of greenhouses that grow crops year round. They are always ready for the next season.

We bought our cucumbers and tomatoes at the Rutland Road store for years and they were huge and tasty. I miss that too. It was fun in the old location with me pulling the cart and my wife buying plants.

The new location is bigger, carries more product and is a sight to behold when they open the doors to start the new season.

They grow good things and they are ready for our weather changes.

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I received this e-mail the other day from a reader and it brought back memories of the same scam that went through the Internet a couple of years ago. People are receiving e-mail that look official with a phony bank logo and everything. Banks do not send e-mail in this fashion.

“We received a fraudulent and e-mail from someone claiming to be the Royal Bank. It just said, 'Message for customer' and then asked us to verify our account. We did not do that but we did call the Royal Bank and they said it was fraudulent because they would never ask for us to verify our account. I just thought people should know about this and thought you might already have heard about these type of e-mail. We have had similar ones from the BMO bank too and we don't even have an account with them. I hope there is some way of letting the public know about these. Thank you for your column - I read it all the time.”

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Twenty years ago Mike and Debbie Shannon came from Calgary to Kelowna to start their business, RPM Automotive on Harvey just west of Kirschner.

The have just increased their working space to seven bays and more parking for cars as they move across the lot to the other side. This leaves some space available for someone in the automotive field to re-establish their business on the busy Harvey Avenue corridor. The Shannon’s also added a seventh mechanic to their roster to service their steady lineup of customers.

Mike and Debbie have established a good atmosphere in their service centre with their policies of personal service. I personally like the way the staff takes an interest in your problems and gets the job done. It is a busy operation and a successful one.

John Thomson is the Okanagan's pre-eminent business columnist writing his column, Rumours and Things, for over 24 years. Plugged in to the valley's who's who, John keeps his readers coming back for more with his straight talk and optimistic perspective on where we are headed next.

When John is not writing his column, he runs a sixteen year old think tank called the Executive Roundtable and holds his popular "Thomson Presents" quarterly business speaker seminars.